Tuesday, June 21, 2005

skin friendly polymer blog

Kids TodayThe Los Angeles Times editorial page, under the guidance of Michael Kinsley, late of Slate, and other venues, recently set up an experiment, called “wikitorials,” emulating the roll-your-own, open editing wiki philosophy. (If you don’t know wiki, here is its manifesto, such as it is: http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki)

To inaugurate the “beta” version of this experiment, readers were invited to edit, last Friday, a 1,000-word editorial, "War and Consequences," about the Iraq war.

“What they had not planned for,” writes the New York Times, “was hard-core pornography, which the paper's software could not ward off. Its open-source wikitorial software allowed readers to post without vetting from editors, who could take down posts only after they appeared.”…

”‘Nothing bad happened really until after midnight on Saturday,’ said Michael Newman, deputy editorial page editor. At 8:32 p.m. Saturday, a posting on www.Slashdot.org, which bills itself as ‘news for nerds,’ directed readers to the Times wikitorial.

“’Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious,’ Mr. Newman said. ‘We were taking stuff down as soon as it went up and staving them off. Finally we had to go to bed. Someone called the newsroom a little bit before 4 a.m. and said there's something bad on your Web site, and so we just took the whole site down.’"

From today’s SLASHDOT:“…Batman isn't from outer space and wasn't born with a mutant gene --he uses his riches, raw determination and technological know-how to equip himself to fight evil. So why couldn't the average geek do the same? I've written a story for Forbes.com that breaks down the Dark Knight's expenses and explains what it would cost to become a real-world Batman using commercially available training and technology.”

Good for you geek boy. Now please shut up.

Female Orgasms!I got this from Reuters:A Dutch research team took ”brain scans of 13 women and 11 men, aged 19-49…while they were being sexually stimulated by their partner and during an orgasm and compared them to images of their brains at rest.”

Team member Gert Holstege told a fertility meeting Monday, "Women can imitate orgasm quite well. But there is nothing really happening in the brain."

During a real orgasm, it seems, areas of women’s brains are “deactivated.” But they stay active when women fake it.

Holstege claimed, "The deactivation of these very important parts of the brain might be the most important thing necessary to have an orgasm.”

Well, that kind of takes the fun out of things, doesn’t it? Unless being stimulated to orgasm while wearing a helmet on your head and being observed by graduate students is your idea of a good time. Come to think of it….

From Netscape:Archaeologists digging in Leipzig, Germany had quite a surprise when they found the remains of two Stone Age figurines that when joined together appear to depict a man and a woman making love, report Great Britain's Guardian newspaper and Germany's Spiegel magazine.

The statues, which are approximately 7,200 years old, seem to shatter the idea that sex was a forbidden subject in that time. Until now, the oldest sexual scenes found by archaeologists were on frescos that date to the time of Christ.

But what really has historians excited is that this is the oldest male clay figurine ever found. Discovered by archaeologist Dr. Harald Strauble of the Archaeological Institute of Saxony, the male figurine was found in two pieces. He dubbed the statue Adonis.

Although Strauble allowed that the figures could be depicting a ritual dance, he dismissed that and said in a news release announcing the find that this is "the oldest representation ever of a pornographic scene."

He told The Guardian, "This is such an interesting discovery, as these figurines are not stylistic, but realistic. They open up a gateway for historians and anthropologists to discuss whether sex really was a taboo subject in the Stone Age."

In other news…Dick Cheney was interviewed on Fox News Channels’s HANNITY & COLMES. (Wow. What a scoop.) Asked about Howard Dean, he said, "I've never been able to understand his appeal. Maybe his mother loved him, but I've never met anybody who does. He's never won anything, as best I can tell."

Cheney is very fond of doing this sort of thing. Remember when he dissed John Edwards during the debates? “Oh, I think his record speaks for itself. And frankly, it's not very distinguished.”

Does he spend all of his time researching the accomplishments of Democrats? Or running around trying to find people who love Howard Dean? When does he find time for his job?

Howard Dean responded that he didn’t care if Dick Cheney likes his mother or not, which is very Howard Dean-ish, isn’t it? He’s got the outrage, which is nice, but he never quite hears what has actually been said.

Back to sex…I got this from Popbitch, a Brit gossip newsletter:“The Nazi created the world's first sex doll: Borghild. The ‘field-hygienic project’ was an initiative of Himmler, who was concerned about the ‘unnecessary losses’ the German army suffered from in France from prostitutes.

“Borhild was created in Dresden in 1941 using ‘skin-friendly polymers’ and ‘a realistic organ.’ Borghild was meant to reflect the beauty ideal of the Nazis: white skin, fair hair and blue eyes. Its creator said it was based on ‘an artificial face of lust... exactly like the common wanton's face.’"

Where, exactly, do these common wantons gather?

Finally, from UPI“Two makers of adult movies plan to sell their products for the console as early as July, and several other pornographers are apparently ready to follow, Japanese newspaper the Asahi Shimbun reported Friday.

"’It is utterly undesirable, but we cannot stop software makers from selling such videos,’ a public relations official at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. said.

What about me?I have eliminated the need for sex through daily vitamin injections. If you know what I mean, and I think you do.